Codebook-based precoding for generalized spatial modulation with diversity

Abstract This paper investigates codebook-based precoding for spatial modulation (SM) and generalized spatial modulation (GSM) systems. Codebook-based precoding allows the system to dispense with full channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). This considerably reduces the feedback overhead. Phase-only codebooks with systematic structure are investigated since they avoid increasing the peak to average power ratio of the transmitted signal. It is shown that the proposed phase-only codebooks yield equivalent performance to published codebooks that involve gain and phase. In addition, a gain-only codebook is designed to supplement the phase-only codebook and reduce the bit error rate (BER) further. We also compare the performance with the Grassmannian codebooks which are proposed for other multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) systems. In GSM systems, several antennas are simultaneously active as a transmit antenna combination (TAC). The BER performance of unprecoded GSM systems is typically inferior to SM systems due to correlation among TACs. However, with codebook precoding, this effect is mitigated, and the performance of the GSM system becomes superior to the SM system. We investigate codebook precoding for GSM systems where precoding is performed per-TAC or per-antenna. Moreover, we investigate the GSM system where the TACs are selected adaptively based on the achievable benefit from codebook precoding. Using computer simulation, it is shown that the performance of the proposed codebooks is very promising in both SM and GSM systems. Per-antenna precoding is superior to per-TAC precoding. Adaptive TACs selection further improves performance.